One

Approaching his seventeenth birthday, Odin Lewis notices odd changes: he can make objects float, predict the future, and Wendell, an imaginary friend he thought gone, begins talking to him again. With Wendell's guidance, Odin learns to harness these powers in ways that could mean the world's salvation or destruction.

The One - Pop Mythology

Reviewed on 9 March 2016

…highly recommended reading for adult and young adult readers alike…

…a wonderfully imagined tale that is every bit as engrossing as The Hunger Games or Divergent series. But The One has a thematic edge of sophistication – both in the science fictional conception and in the elements of conflict. The incorporation and fictional extensions of current theoretical physics related to quantum multiverses serves to both engage the adult reader and spark the curiosity of a younger one. At the core of the story are moral dilemmas and questions typical of the dystopian genre. But while some of the other popular series are mostly related to the fairly common teen themes of social stratification and exclusion, The One takes on the much more complex morality of power. In short, there is much the series has to recommend to a diverse audience across the age spectrum.

Finally, I would also like to make a slightly unusual suggestion for this series: it can and should be used as a late-middle school/early high school teaching tool. The books are well-formed and make for interesting discussions of plot planning and development, story endings and continuation from book to book, crisp sentence structure, etc. Overlaid with a discussion of the moral themes, The One series could make for a very interesting unit of an English class for an age group that is often very difficult to engage.

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